Candida Bowtell

About me

I am Assistant Professor at the University of Birmingham. Until recently I was a Research Fellow here, supported by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship on 'Large structures in hypergraphs'.

Prior to that I was a Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, working with Richard Montgomery. 

I completed my DPhil (PhD) at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Peter Keevash.

My research interests lie in extremal and probabilistic combinatorics, with a particular focus on problems in extremal (hyper)graph theory. 

Perfect tilings of 3-graphs with the generalised triangle (with Amarja Kathapurkar, Natasha Morrison and Richard Mycroft).

Almost every Latin square has a decomposition into transversals (with Richard Montgomery).

A note on improved bounds for hypergraph rainbow matching problems (with Andrea Freschi, Gal Kronenberg and Jun Yan).

Extendibility of Latin Hypercuboids (with Alice Devillers, André Kündgen, Padraig Ó Catháin and Ian M. Wanless), 2023 MATRIX Annals, 681–691 (2025).

Matchings in multipartite hypergraphs (with Richard Mycroft), Combinatorial Theory 5, (2025).

Universality for transversal Hamilton cycles (with Patrick Morris, Yanitsa Pehova and Katherine Staden), Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society 57, 711–729 (2025).

Proof of the Kohayakawa–Kreuter conjecture for the majority of cases (with Robert Hancock and  Joseph Hyde).

The n-queens problem (with Peter Keevash).

A degree sequence strengthening of the vertex degree threshold for a perfect matching in 3-uniform hypergraphs (with Joseph Hyde), SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics 36, 1038–1063 (2022).

Classification of Maximum Hittings by Large Families (with Richard Mycroft), Graphs and Combinatorics 36, 27–39 (2020). 

Upcoming

• St Andrew’s Pure Maths Colloquium, 2026 (date TBC).

• Postgraduate Combinatorial Conference, April 2026.

Mathematics of the chessboard, Birmingham Popular Maths Lecture, March 2025.

Decomposing Latin squares into transversals

• Liverpool Discrete Mathematics Colloquium, September 2025.

• Eurocomb', Budapest, August 2025.

• RSA, Vienna, August 2025.

• Canadian Discrete and Algorithmic Mathematics Conference, Graph Structure and Decomposition mini-symposium, May 2025.

• Birmingham-Open-Warwick combinatorics meeting, March 2025.

• Combinatorics Seminar, University of Cambridge, February 2025.

• Combinatorics Seminar, Georgia Institute of Technology, August 2024.

Tiling thresholds in 3-uniform hypergraphs

• Discrete Mathematics Seminar, Open University, June 2025 (online).

• Combinatorics Seminar, Graz University of Technology, January 2025 (online).

• BIRS Workshop, Movement and Symmetry in Graphs, November 2024.

• Discrete Mathematics Seminar, University of Victoria, November 2024

• BCC, Queen Mary University of London, July 2024.

Matchings in multipartite hypergraphs:

•  2024 Colloquia in Combinatorics, London, May 2024.

Large rainbow structures in complete graphs:

•  Combinatorics Study Group, Queen Mary University of London, March 2023.

The n-queens problem: 

• Women in Mathematical Sciences' day, University of Warwick, May 2023.

• Combinatorics Seminar, University of Warwick, October 2022.

• Combinatorial Mathematics Society of Australasia Seminar, September 2022 (online).

• Symposium Discrete Mathematics, Hamburg University of Technology, September 2022.

•  12th WOMBL 1-day meeting in additive combinatorics and analytic number theory, King's College London, September 2022.

• RSA, Gniezno, August 2022.

• BCC, Extremal combinatorics mini-symposium, University of Lancaster, July 2022.

• Second Armenian Workshop on Graphs, Combinatorics, and Probability, July 2022.

•  7th Lake Michigan Workshop on Combinatorics and Graph Theory, University of Illinois at Chicago, May 2022.

• ACiD Seminar, Durham University, February 2022.

• Seminar on Combinatorics, Games and Optimisation, LSE, January 2022.

• EPC Webinar, December 2021 (online).

• Nachmittagsseminar der Gruppe Diskrete Mathematik, TU Ilmenau, December 2021 (online).

• Combinatorics Seminar, University of Birmingham, December 2021 (hybrid).

• Combinatorics Seminar, University of Oxford, November 2021.

• Combinatorics Seminar, UCL, November 2021.

• Discrete Seminar, Umeå University, November 2021 (online).

• Physics and Probability Seminar, Harvard CMSA, October 2021 (online).

Chess puzzles: from recreational maths to fundamental mathematical structures, North meets South Colloquium, University of Oxford, December 2021 (hybrid).

Matchings in k-partite k-graphs: 

• SIAM - DM21, Extremal graph theory and combinatorics mini-symposium, Spokane, Washington, July 2021 (online).

• BCC, Durham University, July 2021 (online).

• Combinatorics Seminar, University of Bristol, December 2020 (online).

Maximum hittings by maximal left-compressed intersecting families: 

• DIMAP Seminar, University of Warwick, November 2019.

• BCC, University of Birmingham, August 2019.

• RSA, Zurich, July 2019.

• 25th Postgraduate Combinatorial Conference, London School of Economics, June 2018.

Intersecting set systems, Combinatorics Seminar, University of Birmingham, February 2015.

University of Birmingham

This year I will be teaching the first term of LH/LM 3GrpT(4), an introductory course on Graph Theory.

Between 2021 - 22, I organised a reading course on 'Random Greedy Algorithms' and covered some first year lectures in Probability.

University of Warwick (2022 - 2024)

At the University of Warwick I lectured MA4J3 Graph Theory, alongside supervising students in final year dissertations and an undergraduate summer research project.

University of Oxford (2017 - 2021)

At the University of Oxford I was involved with several maths courses for the department and a subset of the colleges. 

2020-2021:

• Class and consultation tutor for 4th Year Probabilistic Combinatorics

• Class tutor for 3rd Year Graph Theory

• College and revision tutor for 2nd Year Probability

2019-2020:

• Class and consultation tutor for 3rd Year Graph Theory

• Class tutor for 4th Year Probabilistic Combinatorics

• College tutor for 2nd Year Graph Theory

2018-2019:

• College tutor for 1st Year Linear Algebra and Analysis

• College and revision tutor for 2nd Year Graph Theory

2017-2018:

• College and revision tutor for 1st Year Probability

• TA for 3rd Year Graph Theory

• TA for 4th Year Probabilistic Combinatorics